Challenges on Successful Completion and Delivery of Public Building Construction Projects: The Case of West Shoa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia

Objectives: To identify the most common challenges or constraints on successful completion and delivery of construction projects in West Shoa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. Besides, this study focuses on stakeholder assessment on the identified constraints and rank challenges according to their impact on time, cost, and quality of the projects. Methods: A pilot study, questionnaire, and literature review were employed to collect primary and secondary data. For this purpose, 53 different challenges were identified, categorized into six major group factors, and analyzed by relative importance index and correlation analysis using the SPSS software. Findings: The identified challenges/constraints were examined by construction stakeholders and ranked according to their impact on building construction projects. Accordingly,Inflation (RII=0.811), Inadequate design, and specification (RII=0.794), Poor planning, monitoring, and feedback mechanism (RII=0.766), Delay in solving design problems (RII=0.766), and less financing capability of the owner (RII=0.760) are the top 5 challenging factors influencing construction project delivery. Finally, the case study was conducted on selected projects to assess how many of the projects were affected by the identified challenges using performance indicators such as scheduled performance index (SPI) and cost performance index (CPI). The average value of (CPI+SPI)/2 of the five selected projects was 0.785which reveals that the projects were under performance. Novelty: The impact ranking of most challenging factors affecting successful completion and delivery of construction projects in West Shoa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia were identified. Economic related factors such as inflation, less financing capability of the owner, and economic instability in the country were the most challenging factors. The CPI and SPI values of selected projects were used as a control to clearly understand the project’s under performance. It is recommended that the concerned body should have a common understanding of those identified constraints and solve them according to their impact ranking. Keywords: Challenges; Successful Completion; Project Delivery; Impact Ranking; Performance Indicator